GOP RFP, WTF?

An embarrassing attempt at an RFP for the redesign of GOP.com has some …

Remember how after last month's GOP tech summit, I suggested that perhaps the Republican Party had begun to "get it" on tech issues? Yeah, maybe not so much. First, take a look at the RFP issued by the Republican National Committee in 2002 when they redesigned their website. It's not terribly remarkable, but it's a 15 page document that goes into reasonable technical detail about their requirements—which is to say, a real RFP. Now take a look at the one they issued this weekend. Dale Franks at The Next Right takes a thorough look at the two-page document, but here are a few (and I use the term loosely) highlights.

Flash interfaces can often make mundane tasks exciting, and having Flash developers who understand user behavior will make the site more user-friendly.

Do you hear that? That's the sound of Joe Rospars laughing his ass off. There's also this gem from Michael Steele, the RNC's beleaguered new chairman:

If we haven’t thought of it - think about it. If it hasn’t been tried -
why not? If it’s going to be "outside the box" - then not only keep it outside the box, but take it to someplace the box hasn’t even reached yet.

I bounced the document off a DC-area Web developer who regularly handles large-scale projects like this. "I've never seen a two-page RFP for a project of this size in my entire life," he told me. "I don't know if they already have a vendor picked, and they're just trying to making it look like a responsible multi-bid procurement, or if they have no real idea of what they need, besides a bunch of idiotic buzz-words." They did, however, expect proposals to include a cost estimate.

As Nancy Scola notes at TechPresident, he's not alone in that speculation: Lots of right-leaning techies concluded that the slim RFP meant that the fix was in and a developer had already been chosen. Whether chastened by the ridicule or simply supplementing the first pass, the RNC took another shot earlier this week with a slightly more detailed five-page RFP providing some more detail about the network of sites a developer would be expected to build for state parties, in addition to the main GOP.com hub.

It was apparently too little too late for Red State's Erick Erickson, though. In a post Tuesday, he concludes that "technological progress on the right is going to be made wholly removed from the RNC," and announces that he intends to "create a society of right-of-center developers" who will work outside the party structure to build tools for conservative activists and candidates.